On January 12, 2010, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 hit just 10 miles west of Porte-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. This quake, the worse in over 200 years in this region, left 3 million people in need of emergency care. The United Nation’s World Food Program (WFP) was one of the many relief teams flown into the country to provide emergency food and water assistance. The collapse of buildings and other infrastructure left much of Haiti and its relief teams without any form of communication in most areas.

The WFP team arrived within 48 hours of the natural disaster and was armed with Proxim Communications equipment that would provide instant coverage at the airport and relief camp. This equipment included multiple “flyaway kits”, each containing 1x5054-BSUR-LR, Orinoco® radios, and other network electronics. As with any massive disaster, the coordination of communication makes it difficult to mobilize, particularly when it takes a coordinated effort among various equipment and service providers working cohesively and rapidly together.

In addition to the WFP, there were many other relief organizations each setting up and utilizing their own networks that typically causes interference and congestion issues. Proxim was engaged to assist the relief team in diagnosing any problems and ensure that the communications network was operating properly during this critical time. The Proxim engineering team took the lead by coordinating hardware, software and system analysis among the various equipment and service providers. A thorough assessment was performed which included testing all radios, antennas, cabling, base stations, software and programming, power sources, as well as other potential causes of connectivity problems such as satellite uplinks and network congestion. The testing and diagnosis led to some findings that allowed each respective vendor and service provider to collaborate, make any necessary modifications, and ensure that the communications network is secure and working properly.

Prior to departing, Proxim’s engineers worked closely with the WFP team on systems training and hand-off. There are several key success factors to be shared regarding communications in natural disasters:

• First and foremost, using rugged equipment that withstands harsh environments, such as the Proxim Wireless antennas and radios, will help reduce communication loss and save money on equipment replacements.
• Qualify all system issues reported from the emergency teams by looking deeper into what they are experiencing. What may appear from the surface to be a specific network problem may actually be a different issue or a compilation of other factors.
• Utilize experienced personnel that understand every aspect of the system and can manage the assessment efforts from hardware and software to user training.
• Take into consideration uncontrollable factors that affect stable communications such as system congestion and satellite uplink response, just to name a few.

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• Take the lead by working with the emergency team, equipment vendors and service providers to correct all of the controllable factors followed by continuous system monitoring and customer follow-up.
• Ensure that system knowledge and training is shared between incoming and departing emergency teams.

Communications will almost always be affected during natural disasters and implementation of emergency systems will be challenged. However, with the proper systems and response plans in place, deployments can be successful as those in which Proxim provided to the WFP team in Haiti.

Challenge:

• Deploy communications relief to the World Food Program team in Haiti during the earthquake aftermath
• Due to the onslaught of individual relief networks being setup, act as liaison among equipment and service providers to ensure stable connectivity

Proxim solutions:

• Tested all equipment, talked to other communications providers and visited antenna sites to determine any and all impacts effecting disaster communications
• Exchanged antenna configuration for optimal performance
• Trained incoming and departing teams to transition system knowledge information

Results:

• The communication system is stable and scalable
• The network continued to grow outside of the Emergency Response Camp
• WFP Emergency Team has been trained to diagnose and address sources of communications impacts within a mass crisis situation